


In Our Bedroom, After The War

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Happy Endings (but not really), M/M, Redemption (but not really), black humour, crime and punishment, the war is over
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 17:10:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5975059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Hux’s expression is too crowded for his face; it’s anger and frustration and pity and disbelief, and nothing fits at all well with any of the others. “If they pardon me, they have to pardon everyone below me,” he says, and the tone is one he might have used towards a very slow and very stubborn child. “They can’t say I was just following orders when I was <b>giving</b> the orders, Ren.”</i>
</p><p>No. No, <i>this</i> must be what going mad feels like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Our Bedroom, After The War

**Author's Note:**

> Straight up, I have to say this story was largely inspired by an absolutely heartbreaking work written by CyanideBreathmint, which is of course the perfect [_Your Rules and Wisdom Choke You_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5734231). It broke my little black heart into tiny little pieces, as did several other stories I read in the same vein.
> 
> And so, I ended up here: I wanted to take the post-movie trope of a "redeemed" Ben Solo and see how his relationship with a doomed Hux would alter his path. And this is what I came up with. May god have mercy upon my soul, because this pairing sure won't.

With one hand on her arm, he drags her away. Rey glares at him, and although she does so without venom, they both know she could break him with barely a word. But she allows it for a good few steps. Then she pulls back, scowls. There’s still a hint of honest concern there, in her bright eyes and low voice.

“Ben?”

He swallows hard, only just manages to spit the words out. “I need to talk to you.”

The swift searching of her gaze leaves him feeling flayed wide open. But he will bear it, for her company. And she sighs, lips pressed tightly together. Then she turns back to the concern writ upon the watching faces of both Finn and Poe. “Oh well, guys, have fun celebrating without me,” she announces with breezy intent, and then she’s the one dragging him. Only when they are far from the party, sequestered away in a room high in the mansion, does Rey speak again. “ _Ben_. Honestly. What’s happening?”

“I went to see Hux.”

Her open concern immediately becomes a shuttered, wary look. “Oh?”

“He wouldn’t see me.”

She looks down at her hands, tightly fisted in her lap. “Oh.”

“Rey—”

“Ben.” There’s pity, there. He finds it kind that she’d try to hide it, but it’s not working. Even without the Force, Rey is an open book. How such an honest creature survived Jakku’s wastes he will never know.

And then she sighs, tries again. Her skin is very pale in the changing lights of the revels below. “Ben, look. He’s just lost a war—”

“He wasn’t _in_ the war!”

“Now, maybe. But he _was_. And he had been, for a long long time.” Running a hand back through her hair, she frowns deep. It doesn’t suit her. But the style does. Ben doesn’t think he’s ever seen her hair long and loose, like this. It reminds him of old holos of his mother, young and smiling and pressed into Han Solo’s tall side. And he has to close his eyes, to will the ache away, before she speaks again.

“Maybe he just needs time to think about it,” Rey ventures, and Ben’s hands are fists at his side. He hasn’t held a lightsaber in months. He still remembers the familiar hum of it, in his hands, under his skin. He speaks too loud, but then Rey had learned to ignore that long ago.

“He _knew_ this was going to happen!”

“That’s still different from seeing it _actually_ happen.”

Such pragmatism only drives him to silence. How Hux would have laughed. He’d tried such tactics upon Kylo Ren a thousand times and failed more often than he ever cared to admit.

“And besides,” Rey says, almost hopeful. “Maybe he’s just trying to protect you.”

She might as well had slapped him upside the head. “What? I don’t need protecting.”

“You were on the same side.” One hand rises, stopping him in the middle of a protest. “It’s probably not such a good thing for you to be seen together, now that it’s over. People look at you strangely enough as it is, without you still going to talk to a war criminal now that we don’t need his information anymore.”

He is very cold. And her expression is horrified, hands clasped over her mouth as if she cannot believe she had let those words out.

“Oh, Ben, I didn’t mean it like that—”

“I need to see him.”

The interruption hurts her; when she rubs her eyes, he’s reminded like a sucker punch to the gut of how very _young_ she is. “I guess…you could talk to your mother. Leia could maybe speak with him, or send someone else to…take a message, I guess. Or something. I don’t _know_. Ben, you can’t think about this stuff now. The war is over. Just…just let that much sink in first, okay?”

He glances out the high window. The party spills out across the grand lawns; in the distance, the city is drunk upon its revels. Apparently they haven’t had enough of firestorm and explosives, considering the fireworks display currently in motion. It’s as if they still don’t quite believe the war is over. Ben isn’t certain it ever will be.

“It’s not that simple.”

“I know that.” And the stupid thing is, he believes her. And then she’s grasping his chin, forcing his face around to meet hers. “Please promise me something.”

“What?”

At first she seems at a loss, as if she hadn’t expected him to listen at all. Then she licks dry lips, blinks hard. “Don’t…don’t get in his head.” He’s already opening his mouth to protest and she speaks right over him. “He wants you to leave him alone. That means, don’t go climbing in there. Especially when he’s sleeping.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

She stares at him. In that, she’s worse than even his own mother. Than even Hux himself.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

She keeps doing it. “The war is over,” she says, with the low and lovely conviction of the just and true. “But if Leia taught me anything, it’s that this is going to last for years. Let him have this, for now. They’re not going to…he’s going to be here for a while.”

And of course Ben had known the endgame from the beginning. Still he feels it now, the same as he always had: the urge to storm through the prison complex as he would have the _Finalizer_ , his old saber blazing, cutting down everyone and everything that crossed his path.

Her small hand lies true on his arm, holding him still, keeping him in this place. “Ben.” She swallows, then speaks; even without the power of the Force behind the words, he doesn’t know how he could ever hope to deny her anything. “Come with me. Back downstairs. Just for a little while, okay?”

“I’m not getting in an orgy with you and your pilot friends.”

Her entire face scrunches up on itself, eyes narrowed and bright. “You’re not invited to that anyway.”

“I bet Poe would say different.”

The peal of her laughter is true and clarion-bright. “Shut up!”

Sometimes he thinks he’s dreaming.

Then he thinks of Hux, alone in his cell, and knows he is not.

 

*****

 

They walk together in unconscious tandem along the exercise yard’s central line. It brings back memories of days on the bridge of a long-destroyed starship. They are even arguing now, as they had then, so very many times. But the guards watching them now do not look away, as had the technicians and officers once had. There is no privacy for them here, nor deference, nor respect.

There never will be, again.

Hux’s expression is too crowded for his face; it’s anger and frustration and pity and disbelief, and nothing fits at all well with any of the others. “If they pardon me, they have to pardon everyone below me,” he says, and the tone is one he might have used towards a very slow and very stubborn child. “They can’t say I was just following orders when I was _giving_ the orders, Ren.”

“Ben,” he corrects; it’s very nearly reflexive now. But the scorn of Hux’s voice burns deep.

“ _Ben_.”

Taking a deep breath, he finds his lungs too tight to hold it all. Pressing his lips together, he shakes his head as if to clear it of extraneous thought, though he of all people knows how impossible it is. The disdain of the guards alone is crushing, ever-present. “But you…it’s like the Stormtroopers. But different.” His head aches, is fuzzy and heavy. But he cannot let this go. Hux might never allow him back. This could be his last chance. And so he tries, again. “You’ve told me stories about the Academy. About your father.”

If his eyes rolled any further back into his head, he’d probably lose them entirely. “I didn’t tell you those stories so you could get a saviour complex about me, Ren.”

“ _Ben_.”

And he breathes in deep through his nose, a bantha’s unhappy snarl. And yet when he speaks, it is soft. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

It’s not about the name. It’s never been about the name. “Don’t.” The panic is rising, hard and jagged and packed with leaking bile. “Don’t _say_ that.”

When Hux smiles, it is crooked and open in a way it has been but rarely before. “I do know how to apologise. I always did. _This_ hasn’t changed that.”

He’s waving one hand around at everything: the prison, his shackles, the cold glare of the guards aiming their blasters in his direction. And Ben stops. He’s staring at the ground and if he still had the use of his influence over the Force it would have cracked open beneath him. His hands are in fists, his breath harsh and panting. The air shimmers between them, thick and bitter, and Hux’s hands are too cold where they close over his own.

“Stop.”

He can barely speak, his tongue thick and his thoughts snarled and furious. “You’re not supposed to touch me.”

“I think they can tell this is calming you down.” And his laughter is low, almost humourless. “Or at least, it’s keeping you from losing control completely.”

He looks up from beneath dark eyelashes, damp and clumped. “Maybe I’m about to break you out.”

And wishes he’d never said a word, when he sees the broken half-smile upon Hux’s face. “What would be the point in that now?”

It’s too conversational, too weary to be anything but the truth. The air is calming around them both, but it is defeat rather than retreat. “I never thought you wanted to die,” he whispers, and Hux only sighs.

“I don’t.” Even pressed up against the heat of Ben’s skin, his hands remain ice-cold. “But I can accept the inevitable.”

“But it _isn’t_.”

“Ben.” Hux lets go, steps back. “You should go.”

He is too thin. He had always been too thin even before. “Are you even eating?”

At first he frowns, apparently lost for words. Then, he actually laughs. “You can check my holo files, if it worries you so much. Every meal, every exercise time. It even gives you my dental and vaccination records, if you’re that interested.”

“ _Brendol_.”

The name sobers him again. “Ben,” he says, taking a step forward. The click of the blasters following his every move keep him at least a foot back. “You need to stop this,” he says, instead. He is very tired, the circles under his eyes as dark as bruises. “I’ve given you what you needed.”

His whisper is a scar upon his very soul. “I need _you_.”

Hux just shakes his head. “You can’t have me.”

Left without words, Ben can only stare. And Hux just smiles, shakes his head.

“But if there was a choice, I would let you keep me.” And then he’s turning, walking away, moving back through the armoured door that will lock firmly between them both. “Good day, Ben.”

 

*****

 

Ben doesn’t want to discuss this with his mother. She had taken his explanation of their rocky and ongoing liaison surprisingly well, considering Hux’s rank and war record. She knows how and why he struggles now. But they had come to her as refugees, and Hux’s fate is out of her hands. And he looks back on those frantic days with little more than despair, when Kylo Ren had been stuck in an impossible choice: kill the failed general, or watch him be executed before his eyes.

 _All I’ve done is delay his death_.

Leia knew that Kylo Ren had killed his own father to advance himself. But Ben had come crawling back to save the life of someone she would have not considered worth even a whit of Han Solo.

No. He cannot take this to her.

“Uncle.”

Luke doesn’t look up from his dismantled lightsaber, though his voice is near-conversational. “Ben.”

The strangeness of the name will never dissipate, not now. Luke had known his namesake. Ben wonders sometimes if Luke feels as though he has betrayed Obi-Wan, having been the one to suggest the name to his sister and her husband. It didn’t seem to matter that Ben Solo had become Kylo Ren when he had followed Darth Vader’s path of dark descent. But Anakin and Obi-Wan had made their peace in death, apparently. Not that Ben knows that for himself. He has never seen a Force ghost. He suspects that for all his power, he never will.

“Can I talk to you?”

And Luke sighs, though he does not retreat. Instead he presses back from the table, waves his mechanised hand at the empty seat across from him. “I’m not sure I can help you.”

Ben takes it anyway. Through the great window, they can look out across the city: Theed. The current capital of the Republic. It doesn’t suit his uncle’s ascetic moods in the slightest. Not that it matters. Luke will be returning to his work soon enough, far away from here. Ben will not be invited. It’s never been said, but it doesn’t need to be. Things might have changed, but no-one is going to trust the man who was Kylo Ren with a herd of Force sensitive younglings.

“What could I teach them, anyway?” he says, sudden and bitter. “How to fail and live all the more miserably for it?”

“Ben.” The kyber crystal glints between them, locked still in its stabilising matrices. “There is work for you yet.”

And he looks out over the city. It’s distant enough that he shouldn’t be able to hear the noise of the place. It beats at the back of his mind anyway, relentless and driving. “What if I don’t want to work anymore?” His fingers clench to fists upon the table. “What if I’m done?”

Luke chooses only silence. And Ben closes his eyes, hunches over himself, the way he had when he was a child and couldn’t bear some failure.

“I can’t watch this,” he moans, nails digging into his palms. Luke is unmoved. But then, he’s seen this a thousand times before.

“You have to.” It almost sounds gentle. “It is your final test.”

The chair pushes back so fast it topples; Ben nearly follows it down, swaying on his feet, vision gone red and blotchy. “You’re worse than Snoke.” How he wishes to turn, to put his fist through the window, to watch his blood drip scarlet upon the clean white floor. And he laughs, sharp and not a little tinted with madness. “He at least gave me the choice of having it happen by my own hand!”

Luke has not risen. Still he sits at the table, his saber in pieces, head tilted to one side. “Would that make it easier?” he asks, very soft. And Ben collapses all at once, sagging over the carven wood, chest tight and eyes clenched shut.

“Maybe,” he whispers. “If I could actually do it.”

Luke remains very quiet. And his hand, his left hand, is very warm over Ben’s own. “I will stay, until it is done.”

“But you have work to do.”

Luke now says nothing. He does not need to. The words hang between them like a condemned man, twisting high upon his own gibbet.

 _I have not finished my work here_.

 

*****

 

Things move quick. Too quick. The war has taken too much, too fast; people want to move on. People want to forget. They want the past dead and buried, and the parts that are inconveniently still alive must therefore be disposed of.

Ben hears about the impending execution only hours before it is to take place. From the frank horror on his mother’s face, she had had no part in his ignorance. And though she says nothing before she leaves, he knows that Leia has gone to argue his case. To allow him one last meeting with the general before he is put to death.

He knows she has failed long before she returns to the house. He is sitting on the lakefront, arms folded over drawn-up knees, when he feels him go. He buries his face in his sleeves, breathes hard. There are no tears. He is a desert.

Her hand is light on his shoulder. “Should I stay?”

While he does not answer, she does not need him to. They sit together, there on the beach, until the sun is low and blood-red upon the horizon. It’s like an open wound, bleeding gold at its edges. Ben doesn’t even know how he died.

“He has every right to hate me.”

Rey, curled into his side, shakes her head. Her eyes are high, fixed on the earliest stars as they begin to come in at the edges of the sky. “He came here of his own free will.”

There’s a smile on his face when he shakes his head. It’s not happy, nor amused. But somehow he must still laugh at the futility of all of it. “I lied to him.”

Rey doesn’t speak it as an accusation. It’s only curious. Somehow that just makes it hurt all the more. “What?”

Stretching out his long legs before him, Ben feels the bite of the cold water on his bare toes. He hadn’t realised they had sat down so close to the edge. “He knew he was going to die if he stayed under Snoke.” He says it slow, with difficulty. This part of the story, she already knows. He can’t look into her eyes when he voices the parts she does not. “But I promised him…when it calmed down. When there was a chance. When Snoke was dead.”

Even now, he can’t say it aloud. Her small hand is firm over his when she does it for him. “That you’d break him out?”

Now he does laugh, bitter and low. “Luke knew.” Closing his eyes, he raises his face, feels the remnants of heat upon his face. It’s too late. The sun is still setting. It will disappear soon enough, leaving him in the cold. “He knew from the start, I think.” And he glances over, too weary to be angry now. “He told me to wait. Until everything was over.”

Her eyes have gone hazy, distant. They reflect the light of the vanishing sun, a thousand kaleidoscope colours in constant flux. “And now it’s too late.”

“It’s not Luke’s fault.” Rey doesn’t bother masking her surprise when she sees he means every word. “He knew that I couldn’t let him go.” When he looks down to where his hands are tangled in his lap he finds the knuckles swollen, very white. “Not alone,” he adds, very soft. And Rey’s head is a light weight upon his shoulder, her sigh too old for the youth of her face and frame.

“We needed you here.”

While she doesn’t speak their name aloud, he can sense it in her weary mind: the Knights of Ren. The only one who could bring them down had been the one who had once stood at their head. It hadn’t been his only use to the Resistance, but it had been a pivotal one. “And now it’s over,” he says, barely audible. Her arms don’t quite reach all the way around his waist, but still she tries.

“He doesn’t blame you.”

“You don’t know him, Rey.” And he’s both glad for it, and miserable too. Rey had never once met General Hux, and for that he must be grateful. Some small part of him still wishes desperately that she could have met Brendol.

“No. I didn’t know him.” The grammatical correction is a dagger in his heart, even when she presses her cheek over that same aching spot, adds softly, “But he loves you.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Idiot.” It’s as affectionate as it is sad. “It’s all around you.” And she waves one hand before them both, as if catching fireflies in her trailing small fingers. “It’s _part_ of you. It’s what makes you strong.”

“I don’t see how.” Never has he felt so bleak, so cold. “All I’ve done is fail him.”

And she is on her knees in front of him, hands either side of his face, nose to nose. The fierceness of her expression could have halted Starkiller itself at the moment of firing. “You gave him a chance to do something good,” she says, low and defiant. “And maybe no-one would have ever forgiven him for the Hosnian System. Maybe this was always going to happen. But he saved lives, too. Because of you.”

He glances upward, sees the darkness creeping in at the edges. “He only wanted to save his own.”

And she sighs, lets him go. “Did he?”

They go back up to the house when it’s almost dark enough to be rendered blind. Leia has not returned. Ben himself can only stand it for a short time, and then he’s slipping away again, alone, back down to the lake. He felt Rey watch him go. She didn’t want to let him fade from her sight. But she had brushed against his mind, and then wordlessly retreated back within her own.

She’s always been so much smarter than him.

It has turned cold, clouded; behind the sky, the wind is rising. Ben would have thought he’d influenced the weather himself, if not for the troubled state of the Force. For all that those who follow the path of Light think it dedicated to justice, Ben knows it to be far more complicated than that. One might never exist without the other. And trying to erase one in favour of the other, well. The scales will be tilted out of alignment for some time. And they all will feel it.

“Is this what being dead is like?”

He turns even as he presses to his feet. For all his training, he nearly falls; only a swiftly extended arm keeps him from faceplanting into the stones beneath unsteady feet. “Hux.”

The form is familiar, and yet indistinct. Luke had always described Force ghosts as being faintly limned in blue, a holo upon the very fabric of reality. Hux is neither of these things. He is as real and vibrant as he had been in life, and yet Ben knows he is dead. His heart aches with the hollow knowledge of it as Hux smiles, says with flat grace, “Hello, Ren.”

“You…” The words tangle in his throat, impossible and choking. He swallows hard, scrubs at watering eyes, tries again. “…you can’t be here.”

His dry little chuckle has changed not a whit from the days when he’d used it to mock the shortcomings of others. “Apparently I am. Because I remember dying.” And now his brow, lightly freckled, furrows deeply. “It…didn’t hurt. That almost felt unfair. I was ready for it to hurt.” One hand, ungloved, rises, waves it all away. “I suppose there’s some mercy amongst the Resistance, after all.” And now he looks directly at Ben, eyes as bright as a freshly-sharpened blade. “Or the Republic. It’s all the Republic now, I suppose. Now that they’ve won.”

“Hux,” he says, helpless, despairing. And those eyes roll skyward now, dark in the miserable night.

“What, no Brendol today?” His voice drops low, turns mocking. “Of all days?”

The step forward is taken utterly without forethought. A trembling hand extends in a motion that seems to belong to someone else. And then it doesn’t matter, because it moves right through him. Ben withdraws it in cold sudden horror. Hux appears only amused, though his smile is thin-lipped and hard.

“Looks like I’m still just out of reach.”

And Ren’s hands grip now around his own upper arms, as if he might hold himself together this way. Still his entire body trembles with something that goes beyond cold. It’s so _dark_. He shouldn’t be able to see Hux at all. And yet the man stands there, watchful and waiting, and Ben’s mind is folding upon itself in chaotic collapse.

“You _can’t_ be here.”

“So you keep saying.” Hux’s gaze skips sideways, out over the lake. He’s frowning now, and Ben doesn’t know at what. “You brought me here, Ren. And now I can’t leave. It seems somehow appropriate.”

The Force flashes through him when he lunges forward, hands outstretched. He doesn’t even know quite what he hopes to achieve, save for touching him again. He doesn’t remember anything more than that, because he next becomes aware of a very different sensation. The cuffs of his trousers are damp, where the seiche of the lake has raised the level high enough to lap at his feet. Disoriented, sitting up, he finds himself staring up at Rey. Luke stands in the distance, a hooded figure shaped like a denunciation. The sun is rising. His eyes hurt, and are full of salt.

“It’s done.” She holds out her hand. In them glints something: a ball chain, fitted with two shimmering durasteel tags. Ben does not need to look at them to know the name, the dates, the title stamped upon them. They are very cold in his palm when he wraps his fingers tight about their insubstantial weight.

“You need to come home, now.” Those lovely eyes are damp, very wide. How like her, to cry for someone whose death should have caused her to rejoice. But then Rey is better than all of them. Better than all of this. She will be going with Luke.

Ben will be staying here.

Despite the arguments of theology, of child grooming and brainwashing, many have said it is unfair, that Ben Solo – Kylo Ren, as was – should be pardoned of his crimes when he has harmed so many. No-one had said much of anything during the war, of course. Back when he was useful. But with it over, they are turned now to punishment. Their bloodlust is rising, and will not be slaked by the likes of even Hux alone.

“My death was surprisingly bloodless.”

Ben turns, eyes wide, staring at the space behind him. There is nothing there.

“Ben?” Rey’s voice is hesitant, almost strange. “What are you looking at?”

He’s staring, still. He should stop. But he can’t. “Nothing.”

_Oh, is that all I am to you?_

Ben closes his eyes. “We should go home.”

 _If only we were all so fortunate_.

 

*****

 

Leia loved him. She still does. But she is just _busy_. During the day she is never at the house; in the evenings, he sees her there but rarely. He cannot resent her for it, in that they see each other at least once a day. She makes certain of it. It could be just a moment, snatched and sudden, but he is her son. And she won’t let him forget it again.

He, on the other hand, has little enough to do. Under house arrest, with his power somewhat fettered by the restraints inherent in the amulet about his throat, he cannot be as he was. It is a small, innocuous chain; the pendant itself appears little more than a sliver of opalescent rock, knocked free of some branching geode.

It’s more complicated than that. He still pays it little enough attention. It dampens what he might do with it, but it cannot sever his connection to the Force. He meditates, goes through his forms, meditates again. Before the war ended, there had been more to do. He had had information to offer, then.

Now, he is but a ghost of a past world – two past worlds, as it were. Ben Solo died when Kylo Ren rose from his ashes. Now, Ben walks again in the remnants of Kylo Ren’s body, an old ghost inside the empty machine.

The restraint is not the only chain about his throat. Hux’s dogtags sit just beneath it. They never get warm, no matter how long they are in contact with his skin. But he hasn’t seen Hux again. It’s hard to know if it had been but a hallucination, perhaps one brought on by strong emotion. It would not have been the first time. In his desperation for approval, both Kylo and Ben had often envisaged Darth Vader come before him. But those visions had always held the bitter tang of imagination.

Hux had felt _real_.

It comes to him there, one strong memory dredged from a painful past, even as he stands now upon the long wooden veranda of his mother’s house. He pauses in his forms, arms trembling with exertion, sweat in his eyes. His lips taste of salt and copper; it had been the same, then. The last night, upon the shuttle. Before they had made contact with the Resistance.

So often everything between them had been hard, and fast. That last time, they had been wordless in their consensus that it be slow. Even had they been quick, they still wouldn’t have been enough time for all that they wanted. But in the moments before they had docked with an orbiting station, Hux’s hand had moved fast over Ren’s cock, bringing him off with ruthless efficiency. “I’d have you inside of me, one last time.” And he’d licked hot come from his fingers, sliding the glove back on with an arch look. “But this is all we can have right now.” The taste of them both had been mingled upon his tongue when Hux pressed the words to his lips in a biting kiss. “You owe me, Kylo Ren. Ben Solo. Whoever you are.”

Ben had never touched him again.

“You never did make good on that promise.”

He allows his arms to fall, closes his eyes. “I didn’t promise you anything.”

“You promised me everything.”

When he opens his eyes, he finds Hux standing but a few steps from him. Still the distance between them might as well have been made of lightyears. “That was Kylo Ren.”

Leaning back against the wooden balustrade, Hux crosses first his arms, then one ankle over the other. His legs are so long, straight and perfect in his trousers. They are not what he had worn in life, plain and innocuous as they are. Ben has the sudden terrible sense that these are the clothes he had died in.

And Hux’s arched smile is cold, unforgiving. “So, Ben Solo isn’t responsible for anything Kylo Ren has done?” He waves a hand in dismissal; Kylo Ren had seen that gesture a thousand times, when some underling had greatly disappointed the general. “Oh, yes. I _forgot_. Ben Solo has a Republic pardon. My mistake.”

“Hux—”

Ben doesn’t look away. He doesn’t even blink. Hux is just _gone_. But then, he isn’t. He’s still there. He’ll always be there.

Ben turns his eyes to the sky. It’s very clear today. Perfect weather for skimming low over the lake, kicking up chop, dipping wings, spinning into endless spiral.

Han had always said he would be a natural.

 

*****

 

He finds her two days later without even realising he’d been looking for her. But then she hadn’t exactly been hiding from him. She probably hadn’t even known he’d wanted her – or at least, he tells himself that. In truth he’d long ago understood that Rey would become stronger in the Force than he might ever hope to achieve. It’s not a matter of potency or potential. She simply is at peace with who she is.

Ben doesn’t even know his own name, some days.

Rey is a shaft of white light, practising her forms with a double-handed staff; it’s wooden, crafted only for practice. She’d never say it aloud, but he can sense her affinity with the simple weapon. Her ability with her double-bladed saber is a terrifying thing, to enemy and ally alike. But she prefers this: the quiet, the familiar, the life she used to have.

And she spins, points one end a bare millimetre from his throat. Ben blinks, just once.

“Your footwork is heavier than normal,” he notes, eyes flicking down to her bare feet. “It’s slowing your thrust. You’d have more power, if you lightened it.”

For a moment she holds the stance, chest heaving, strands of damp hair falling into her pale eyes. Then she shrugs, lets the staff fall as she slips back into a casual stance. It makes her look like a moderate wind could blow her down. But this is a woman who could raise storms with but a flick of her wrist. “Yeah, I know I’m a bit rubbish this morning,” she sighs, flipping her hair back, the staff limp in one hand. “I was up too late last night.”

Ben raises an eyebrow. “More information than required.”

Her slap is hard enough to bruise the forearm where it lands. It’s not as if she meant it. He welcomes it all the same. “Not like _that_. Pervert.” Now she’s walking across the salle, wordlessly confident in the assumption that he will follow her. “Luke and I were talking.”

And he does follow, even as he feels the faint frisson of something very much like fear. “You are leaving.”

For a long moment she says nothing, carefully fitting the practice staff back upon the rack. Only after she has straightened all the others to some exacting unspoken standard does she sigh, though she doesn’t look at him. “Not now,” she says, and one hand rises again, falls away before she can take another weapon. “But soon.” Her face, open and lovely, is grave when she looks up to him. And then she smiles, cheeks dimpling deep. “You’ll be okay.”

He would smile himself, but it would be forced, strange. He doesn’t think he has ever smiled with the ease and grace that comes so easily to Rey. “I will have to be.” While his own hands itch suddenly for the weight of a weapon, practice or not, he keeps them firm at his sides. “They’ll jump at the opportunity to lock me up, if I misbehave.”

The smile fades, her head tilting to one side. “Your mother won’t allow it.”

“My mother isn’t empress.” The word hurts, even if it is not quite the right form for maximum injury. “She can’t control everything.”

“She doesn’t need to.” And her arms are tight around him, her body pressed very close to his own. There’s so little of her, this little string bean of a girl. Yet she is as a pillar of granite, and he holds her back in wordless gratitude. The words are whispered into one ear, sweet and true. “You are _strong_ , Ben. You can get through this.”

He won’t cry. He hasn’t cried in years. His eyes prickle with saltwater all the same. “I don’t deserve you.”

Pulling back, he sees a broad grin has taken over her face completely. Its simple power lays waste to his heart entire. “No-one does,” she says, and gives a gamin little shrug. “But I’m generous. I make allowances.”

“Those boys are doomed.”

“And they love it.” And she raises herself on her tiptoes, plants a kiss on his nose. “Now go away. I’m working.”

_Should I be jealous?_

Rey can’t hear him. They never can.

But the steady footsteps follow him still, match him stride for military stride as Ben walks away.

 

*****

 

This is one of the many places where his grandfather had courted his grandmother. He almost wants to laugh, when he hears his voice floating across the meadow.

“Meditating, are we?”

Ben opens his eyes, sees Hux striding through the long grass towards him. He doesn’t move. He only waits. “I need to talk to you.”

Opening his hands, closing them again, Hux is all misplaced humour that he clearly doesn’t feel. “Isn’t that all we ever do?”

And Ben allows his eyes to fall shut, his body but a vague memory. The edges of his consciousness are unravelling, pulling free, slipping away. Hux has drawn very close, his voice but mere moments from his ear. But he can’t feel it. Once, it would have been cool and condescending against his skin. Now, it is all sound and memory.

“What are you doing?”

Ben sets his jaw, frees his mind. “Come with me.”

With a snort, Hux stands upright. Ben doesn’t need to see to know his hands are clasped military-perfect at the small of his back. “Because I’ve never regretted that.”

He didn’t say no. Ben doesn’t wait for him to even make the attempt. With a faint flicker of pain, he _throws_ them both. It’s a jolt, his entire body stretching in all directions, before suddenly snapping back into place. Hux himself makes no sound, and for a moment Ben thinks he has failed. And then he opens his eyes. The scene in which he sits is almost the same, only subtly different. But then his recall is very good, but never perfect. The shape of the trees, the scents, the colour of the water: they are close to the originals, yes.

And the sky is perfect. He stares at it too much, perhaps.

Hux looks around curiously, brow furrowed. The sun glints very gold from his red hair. “A dreamscape?” he asks, but it’s clearly academic. Overcome with sudden exhaustion, Ben lets his head loll forward, barely breathes out his assent.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

That word, coloured with bright affront, is what gets Ben on his feet again. Already Hux is distracted, staring out across the lake at some little boat making its meandering way across the glassy surface. Ben doesn’t care. It makes it easier to steps forward, to place one trembling hand upon his cheek.

And Hux blinks, too startled to step back. “Oh.” And then wry understanding curls about his words, makes them crooked and small. “I see.”

Ben does not back away. “I owe you a debt,” he says, and Hux snorts, loud and forced.

“Perhaps I don’t wish to collect upon it anymore.”

They are kissing a moment later. Everything about it is strange, at first. A memory, treasured and kept close, can be never quite the same as reality – even one imagined in such perfect clarity. But then Hux responds, rising against him, and Ben forgets everything else around them.

All too soon, Hux draws back with a sigh. “It’s only a dream, Ben.”

“Does that matter?”

It seems quite against his will, that his hands are rising, his fingers tangling in his hair. “It’s too long,” Hux observes, though he doesn’t sound the slightest bit disapproving. “You should cut it.”

Ben doesn’t move. “You like it.”

“You should cut it.”

Repetition had never worked with Kylo Ren. It doesn’t do much for Ben Solo, either. They trade kisses, again, this time with something of an edge to it. Both are breathing heavily when Ben takes his hand, leads him down to the lake’s edge. It’s only then, feeling the leather under his skin, that Ben realises what Hux is wearing.

“…I can’t believe you dress like a general even in my dreams.”

He sniffs, proud and prissy and utterly perfect. “This is how I was _raised_ , Kylo.” But then there’s an odd note in his voice when he adds, much quieter, “You can’t strip away years of indoctrination in a moment.”

There’s something like hope in that, a burning bright-hot ball in his chest. For a moment, it doesn’t even matter that Hux is already dead. “I thought you said you weren’t indoctrinated?”

He shrugs. The padded shoulders had always made him look broader than he really is. “What does it matter now?”

“You’re still here.” The passion of it surprises Hux. It’s almost sad, but Ben is pressing their lips together, just briefly. “That’s what matters,” he whispers against them, and then looks out over the lake before Hux can scowl at him again. “The water is very calm, today.”

“And your point would be?”

Wordless, Ben turns back. His hands move to his belt first, and then his high collar, undoing the hidden buttons. The shirt and the undershirt come next. The gloves stay on. The sight of them – black leather against the faint freckling of pale skin – sends a shiver first across his skin, and then under it.

“Ben.” His eyes snap upward, and he finds Hux staring at him with something close to pity. He’s already stripping the gloves off. “Ben, it makes no difference.”

“Brendol.” It’s so strangled it could never sound romantic. “ _Please_.”

With a sigh, Hux undoes his boots, pulls them off; before placing them aside, he neatly balls the socks into the toes. Then he shucks off underwear and trousers together. Naked before him, now, he opens his arms and shrugs. For all the indolence of the pose, Ben can still see the rising flush high upon his pale cheeks.

“Are you satisfied?”

 _Never_.

His own clothing is so much simpler to shed. Moments later, they stand naked together. Their hands are joined and Ben has no memory of how it happened. Hux stares at them, and sighs again, as if so very put upon.

“This is ridiculous.”

And Ben smiles. “Can you even swim?”

“Shut up, Kylo.” He breaks away, running, right down into the water’s edge. Ben follows a moment later. He had swum so often here, as a child. It’s better, with Hux: chasing. Dunking. Diving. It’s a game and then it is not. He is drowning even when he breathes deep of the thick oxygen of Naboo’s atmosphere. But it doesn’t matter. In dreams, they might both live forever.

On the shore they spread Hux’s greatcoat out beneath their damp bodies. It ends with them in a tangle of limbs, of tongues and lips and wandering hands. And then Hux is shoving back at him, a fierce and amused glint in his pale eyes.

“You’re not going to fuck me,” he says, breathless. “Not without something to ease the way. I’m not a masochist.”

The lubricant is in Ben’s hand a moment later; Hux is trapped somewhere between astonishment and disgust. “Where did you even _get_ that?”

“This is a dream.” Ben smiles as he lowers his face to his, nips gently at a swollen lower lip. “We can have whatever we want, in a dream.”

And it is a true dream, everything blurring and blending together; one moment he is slicking up his hands, the next they move together in frantic thrust and slide. And then Ben is biting deep into the flesh of Hux’s shoulder, drawing blood, tasting iron and copper and salt and _life_.

It’s wordless, afterward. The imagined sky turns to night far above their heads. Up there, Ben can see a thousand stars and more. They had seen far more from aboard the _Finalizer_. They had had entire galaxies, then.

“Am I supposed to forgive you, now?”

Ben rolls over, on top of him. “No.” And as Hux shoves at him, trying to shift his greater weight, he leans down, touches their lips together. “Just…stop talking.”

A little huffed breath, and he stills. But Hux has never lain down before a battle he might yet win. And so they fight, again. And again and again and again.

There are no winners here. Ben wonders if that’s because the victory is already both split, and shared.

 

*****

 

“You want to leave.”

He only just resists the urge to throw up his hands, to sweep aside the half-finished plate before him, to storm across the room in a tempest of temper. “I know I can’t,” he says, finally, defeated. And Leia still sits across from him, knife in one hand, fork in the other, as composed as she would be before any other guest in her house.

“Can’t you?”

Despair is an old friend, one he might never run from. It matters not which side he has aligned himself with; it is always there, awaiting his return with open arms. “Mother.” He buries his face in his hands, meal quite forgotten. He hadn’t been hungry anyway. “Mother, you can’t just…”

“I’ve never exactly been one for the rules.”

 _You don’t want me anymore. I’m too broken. I’ll never be your Ben ever again_.

And she’s sweeping around the table, wrapping her arms around him, cradling him close. “Oh, Ben. No. _No_. Never that.” He doesn’t even know how he’d hoped to hide the thought from her. She has always been so strong with the Force. Sometimes he thinks she is stronger than them all.

“Ben,” she says, very soft, fingers stroking over his hair. “You don’t understand.”

As she leans back, he glances up, blinking hard against the sudden light of the dining hall. “What don’t I understand?”

“Before. When you were gone.” Her smile is a lovely thing, carved of grief and love alike. “You were lost. I could not feel you. I didn’t know where you were – I knew where Kylo Ren was, of course. But Ben? No.”

He has gone very quiet, and very still.

“If you go now,” she says, “I will know where you are.” The hand that rests upon his scarred cheek trembles, just a little. “As I always knew where your father was.”

“ _Mother_.”

Even when she withdraws her hand, the warmth of her touch lingers, a memory forming and made. “There is something calling you away.” And she tilts her head, the smile one he knows all too well. She’d worn it every time Han Solo had gone back to his ship: proud. Knowing. Resigned. “I will not stop you.”

He swallows, but still the words are dry and catch upon the rough surfaces of his throat. “They won’t forget this. The Resistance.”

“You gave them so much, Ben. Yes, you took much, too,” she says, raising a finger when he moves to say otherwise. “But then the Force is about balance. The Light, the Dark: they are but facets. The Force is all.”

It is a miracle that she should be able to speak such words, let alone mean them. But she does: she, who has seen much joy, and so much suffering heaped upon it. As a child he had thought it odd she never trained as a Jedi. He knows now she is perhaps the only one who stands at the centre of it all. She is neither Light, nor Dark. Leia Organa simply _is_.

And he aches.

“But I’ll never see you again.”

These are a child’s words, a child’s fear. And when she gathers him to her breast again, his cheek damp with tears, the familiar scent of her brings back a thousand memories of years long past. There’s the light perfume, and the faint heaviness of oil, a tang of burning ozone. She never flies herself, and yet spends more time in the hangars than many technicians. And yet still she is a senator, a general, a wife, a sister, a mother.

“I’ll always be with you.” Her lips move soft through his hair. “You’ll know where I am. Just as I will always know where you’ll be.”

His eyes stay tightly closed. He should be too big for this. She has always been so tiny, and he has become so big. But in this she is larger than the universe entire, enveloping, comforting, eternal.

“I love you.”

And she smiles. “I know.”

 

*****

 

Rey is gone. Luke has left with her. Poe and Finn slope dejectedly about the hangars, deprived of their heart and centre. Ben watches them, but then finds it only reminds him of the holes in his own aching heart. Poe’s ship is easier to look at. It’s a beautiful thing, if one cares enough to notice.

Finn has retreated back into the barracks when Ben wanders over to where Poe is staring at the wing array as if it has grown two heads. “Why don’t you just fly?” he asks, and means it. “And just…forget everything?”

“Flying reminds me of her.” And he glances over, wan and weary and yet somehow utterly and wonderfully at peace. “Being with her, with Finn, with them both…it’s like flying.”

Ben wrinkles his nose, lips curling up in the same motion, knowing it makes him look no older than age three. Hux had always hated it. He’d perfected the manoeuvre during Kylo Ren’s assignment to the _Finalizer_ for a reason. “And _this_ is the slick talk that got them both into your bed?”

But then, there are mysteries in these galaxies that even the Force might not explain. Ben retreats to the shadows to watch as Poe makes a valiant effort to distract himself from Rey’s absence. And he does try. He works her over, warms her up. But the X-Wing does not leave the hangar. While she is cleared for take-off Poe just walks away, shaking his head, one hand raised in defeat.

“Can I take a minute, buddy?”

Ben waves his own hand in dismissive return. It’s not even as if they’d been spending time together, so much as just moping in the same general vicinity. “Sure. Whatever.”

Their odd friendship only becomes stranger when he remembers how he had resented him so much, once. Poe Dameron is everything the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo should have been: charming, charismatic, a pilot to write legends by. Everybody loves Poe. He is something you can believe in.

BB-8 trails him like some loyal hound, and as if sensing his eyes upon them, the little astromech glances back. Then it turns resolutely away. It has hated him ever since Jakku. He doesn’t blame it in the slightest.

But then it looks back. It’s…nodding towards the ship. And then it rolls away, just a little faster, determined to catch up to its beloved master. Ben frowns, glances up. And then rolls his own eyes. Poe is being careless, leaving the X-Wing in such a state.

It is almost too easy to drop down into the opened cockpit. He may but rarely pilot, but Ren had flown his first X-Wing at the age of ten. This particular ship has been calibrated and modified to Poe’s exacting specifications, but all he’s doing is shutting her down so the fuel cells aren’t wasted.

But he doesn’t. Muscle memory leads to levers flicked, checks run, engines flickering from standby to full life. The first of the two chains about his throat is quiescent. It only prevents him from using the Force for his own ends, anyway.

It doesn’t prevent the Force from using him for its own.

And Hux’s tags are warm against his quickening pulse.

“Ah, Poe.” The surprise of the tower technician is palpable, even across the open comms channel. “You’re going, then?”

Ben says not a word. He simply guides the ship from the hangar, and prepares for take-off. No-one stops him. Not that he knows what he would do even if they tried.

He only starts breathing again when they break atmo.

The cockpit is too small. It should not be possible. But as Poe’s ship soars higher Hux is at Ben’s side, one hand upon the back of his seat, leaning forward, looking out to the growing sky before them both. His eyes are so very terribly blue, and filled with stars.

“I’m free.”

It’s unfair. Unkind. Ben says it anyway, voice breaking upon every syllable. “Please stay with me.”

“As if I have a choice.”

There’s laughter in there somewhere. They haven’t forgotten how, not yet. And Ben closes his eyes. But he’s still wide awake. That’s all that matters as they fly on into the dark, and the light.


End file.
